


Closer Contact

by galimau



Category: Alex Rider - Anthony Horowitz
Genre: Dubious Consent, Dubious Morality, Other, Seduction Classes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 16:30:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19154785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galimau/pseuds/galimau
Summary: SCORPIA doesn't believe in letting potential go to waste.Or: Yassen Gregorovich was young, pretty and under contract for four more years. It would be a shame not  to make use of that.





	Closer Contact

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the warnings for dubcon, and dubious everything, really. Not a happy fic, though for a story about sex it has surprisingly little sex in it at all.

Yassen walked into the Principal's office and a surprise evaluation.

Two operatives, a man and a woman, he hadn’t seen before were making polite conversation with Mr. Nye as everyone stirred untouched cups of tea. The appearance of courtesy without any trust. It passed for politeness in SCORPIA.

“Cossack. Thank you for joining us. Punctual as always,” Mr. Nye said warmly. As if lateness was an option for anyone who wanted to remain employed and alive. “I’d like to introduce you to two of our more specialized operatives, Poppy and Rouse.” He waved a hand to each of them in turn, never shifting his focus entirely off Yassen. It was a palpable weight in the air, and that feeling of intense regard set Yassen’s hackles on end. He nodded shallowly at the new operatives and kept his eyes from flicking back toward the door.

Poppy smiled absently in his direction. She had an open, friendly sort of face without a drop of malice in her wide-eyed expression. Sitting in the inner sanctum of one of the most dangerous places in Europe, she gave the impression of a misplaced Venetian tourist, a little confused at where vacation had taken her. Yassen mistrusted her immediately.

Rouse wore his threat closer to the surface. Charisma edged with lazy cruelty. He reminded Yassen of Mrs. Rothman and her deep red smile.

He reminded him of Hunter, too.

“How old is he?” Poppy asked Mr. Nye, face still turned toward Yassen. He hesitated to say that she was looking at him, because there was something unnervingly vacant about her expression.

Mr. Nye didn’t bother checking the file in front of him. “Around twenty.”

“He looks younger than that,” Rouse commented from his sprawl in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair. If Poppy was made of doll-like apathy, Rouse was all haughty scrutiny. He stared baldly, not bothering to disguise the flick of his eyes up and down Yassen’s body. The stare landed on his face, as Rouse tilted his head back to look at him through long lashes. “But if he’s twenty, he’s done growing.”

It was true. Genetics and malnutrition through his teen years conspired to keep him smaller than average. Naturally, delicate features did the rest. When he took the time to think about it, it bothered him. Now, though, Yassen was preoccupied by the growing feeling that without his notice, things had taken a turn for the worse.

Dismay was an unwelcome feeling, because it meant that at some point, he’d gotten complacent. Started thinking that he’d be left alone.

Mr. Nye beamed at the three operatives sizing each other up in his office. “Yassen must have made quite the impression on Mrs. Rothman when they first met. She recommended to Hunter that he be trained in seduction, and though he agreed, it fell to the wayside with all that unpleasantness a year ago.” Mr. Nye spread his hands as if to imply that such miscommunications were inevitable.

Fear or repulsion would have been natural to feel at hearing ‘seduction’, but even standing in front of Poppy and Rouse - _specialized operatives_ indeed - all Yassen could muster was irritation with Mr. Nye. ‘Unpleasantness’ was insulting in its understatement of what Albert Bridge had cost Yassen.

“What do you think of his potential?”

Rouse approached him. In motion he was less like Hunter, graceful but without the current of aggression that had made Yassen's mentor such an intimidating man. This man moved like he was dancing, rather than a prowl. The contrast made it easier to tolerate when Rouse stopped in front of him and stroked his cheek with a warm hand.

“He’s pretty enough, but not very charming.”

Yassen kept his face blank. He wasn’t prideful enough to argue with that. He knew full well that his talents lay more with killing people than talking to them.

Mr. Nye made an encouraging sound, and Rouse brushed a thumb over Yassen's mouth.

Yassen blinked up at him, and tried to consider his options. Tried to figure out if he even had options. Rouse was still staring at him through half-lidded eyes, and Mr. Nye had his hands steepled on his desk as he watched his little test unfold. Poppy wasn't watching them, but from the smile playing over her lips Yassen thought she found the entire affair slightly funny.

The thumb pressed more firmly against his mouth, and with a quiet sense of resignation growing in his stomach, Yassen parted his lips. Immediately the finger slipped inside and pressed down on his tongue, moving further and further to the back of his mouth until he was breathing carefully through the urge to gag. The way Rouse was staring at him left little doubt that this was part of his evaluation. Long seconds slipped by while Yassen swallowed down the instinct to pull away. Despite the expansive windows and generous decor, the room felt very small.

He must have passed, because Rouse gave a half-smile and released the pressure on the back of his tongue. Yassen kept still as Rouse explored the rest of his mouth lazily, rubbing the pad of his thumb over the sharp points of his molars and slipping between his gums and lips.

By the time he pulled his finger out, it was so wet that a long string of saliva hung between them, connecting Rouse’s thumb and Yassen’s bottom lip. When Rouse flicked his hand, it snapped and landed on Yassen’s chin. He suppressed a grimace at the feeling, but something must have shown in his expression.

“He’s _very_ pretty,” Rouse amended with a laugh. His hand was on Yassen again, tilting his face to peer into his eyes. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

Yassen blinked back at him and didn’t bother answering.

The thumb - still wet - dragged its way over Yassen’s lips again. He opened his mouth, but this time Rouse didn’t push his finger inside. Instead he swept lower, through the spit on Yassen’s chin, and rubbed the whole mess in a wide circle across his cheek.

“Yes. Yes, I think he has potential.”

* * *

If any mysteries about people’s bodies had survived interrogation training and the few close-range kills over the past year, seduction classes ensured that none remained. He was their only student; which Mr. Nye had readily admitted was on intentional. Class size at Malagosto was always small, but apparently some subjects required a more hands-on approach.

It was, Yassen thought, its own kind of torture. Even the most pleasurable sensations left him feeling too sensitive and tense in the afterglow. No amount of careful attention or rationalization about the purpose of this education overrode his caution about allowing people so close to him.

The first time Rouse latched his mouth to Yassen’s neck, all he could think about was how thin the skin was there. How vulnerable he was to those white teeth.

Rouse just nipped and sucked and laughed at the hammering pulse beneath his lips.

“It’s not that different from RTI. Just another thing your body does,” he explained. Another bite, sharper than the first. “You’re too tense. Not at all flattering for most partners. Of course, some might want you to struggle.” He punctuated this observation with a stinging slap, fingers curling around the jut of Yassen’s hip bone. Not a bruising hold, but firm. A demand for focus.

Yassen managed a faint noise of agreement and focused on keeping his body loose. On communicating appreciation and arousal as his guts clenched and tried to rebel against the pressure inside him. Yassen wasn’t required to like it, both his teachers had been clear on that, but it would make it easier if he could learn to.

The next time Rouse bit at his neck, Yassen arched into the sensation and felt a slick smile against his skin.

Almost a month later, his teachers still seemed pleased with his performance.

Poppy’s delight at the early revelation that he was completely inexperienced, no teenage fumblings of any sort, was incandescent and long-lasting. It earned Yassen the honor of being her favorite student and a degree of undivided attention from both instructors.

“No bad habits to break,” she explained one afternoon. They were acting the part of young lovers, sitting on a bench in the Piazza San Marco, watching the eddies of foot traffic move around them. It would have been almost pleasant, except that she had claimed Yassen’s hand as hostage in her lap, tracing light circles on his palm until his fingers were twitching at the sensation.

“A lot of the students that come through Malagosto are former military. There’s a different culture there with sex. Or even if they aren’t, they’re adults with their own ideas about what they like and dislike. It’s hard to retrain preferences.” There was honeyed sympathy in her voice, undercut by the twist of malice around her smile. That students tapped for potential in her field of expertise were trained regardless of difficulty went without saying.

Yassen didn’t have any preferences, aside from his desire not to be touched, and that was no option at all.

* * *

 Sex had never been something Yassen gave much attention to. It was all around him in Moscow; in back alley trysts, glimpsed through open apartment windows or offered on the street corners he begged on. A tidy house run by the woman down the hall, who Dima had always tried to puff up his chest and talk to. Dirty business in hard times, but no dirtier than the rest of them.

At fourteen, Yassen had put it mostly out of his mind except to avoid anyone who’s eyes lingered too long on young boys all alone in the world. The following years had driven it from his thoughts entirely, locked into a type of suffering so grinding and repetitive that thinking about anything beyond the next day was worse than useless.

He felt like he would have been happy to never think of it again at all, if Mr. Nye hadn't deposited him into the laps of Rouse and Poppy.

Maybe it wasn't fair to blame the principal for this latest indignity - he knew the recommendation had come from Rothman, and no one denied the Board. Knew too that Hunter had agreed to the training, but thinking too hard about that made Yassen's chest cave open with something between betrayal and desire.

He would still be bent and twisted in rooms that didn't even have the decency to be darkened, every movement and shudder of his body on display for review, but perhaps it would have been Hunter rather than his current teachers.

...probably not, though. Somehow Yassen couldn't imagine Hunter in this particular line of work.

There had been something magnetic and attractive about him to be sure, but Yassen remembered how his arms wrapped around his wife, how Hunter had cupped her face and swollen stomach in turn. No, these classes were something that Hunter would have given him over to no matter if he lived or not, and even that knowledge didn't make it easier to remember that he was still dead.

Yassen pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth, staring down at the sheaf of paper Poppy had given to him after their last meeting. _The Biology of Attraction_ , an overview of the differences behind seduction-based missions against civilian targets or other operatives, all the little weaknesses that grew in the cracks of loneliness or the drive of base want.

These classes had been hard, but it was… nice to have concrete assignments that relied on research and analysis. Writing responses on how he would approach different targets, what appealed to different types of people. It was easier when he could learn about sex in the abstract or memorize lists of indicators of arousal in body language. Even the days when he was told to demonstrate what he had learned on one of his instructors - always impassive - stopped bothering him after he pressed down his distaste. Other people, living, dead, or caught in painful limbo between, weren’t as mysterious or as horrifying as he’d thought even a year ago. If he’d been given that splinter of a knife now, he was sure that he could dig the throat out of a target.

It was his own body that was the hardest to accept - the feeling of being trapped inside it while his pulse raced and arousal curled heavy in his gut, teased out by skilled hands and slow mouths.

Rouse had been right, as it turned out: sex was something his body did, and as the class wound to a close it was something his body was good at doing. Different than combat training but no less precise, and used to the same effect.

When he was younger he’d never thought about sex, but now he was sure that it would never be able to cross his mind without a string of clinical reminders about what he was doing well or poorly, the need to angle his head this way or that, or the unnerving vulnerability of being on his knees with his mouth full and a hand cupping the curve of his skull, fingers playing over pressure points that could send him screaming.

* * *

 It all ended less than sixty days after his first class. Yassen was too valuable to keep out of the field for any longer than that, and just like his first time at Malagosto his teachers had been impressed at how quickly he picked up new skills.

The knock on his door came earlier than expected, but only by a few minutes. Yassen didn’t bother to pull his shirt on as he moved toward the door, still damp from his post-workout shower. If it was Rouse, the shirt would be redundant and if it wasn’t, the gun on his hip would do a better job protecting him than thin cotton ever could. It wasn’t like he had any modesty to preserve.

When the door swung open, Rouse was waiting, leaning against the far wall, lazy down to his bones, if you didn’t see the gleam in his eye. Yassen refused to acknowledge his games, stepping back from the doorway and moving to collect the papers from his desk. That was how it went: a request came from Poppy and was handed off to Rouse, or the other way around. Whoever he saw next. There was no spare time and fewer secrets between the three of them, as much as it had grated at first.

Rouse nodded in thanks and tucked the papers under his arm. Made no move closer to Yassen or toward the bed, just stared with blunt scrutiny as Yassen ignored the beads of water threatening to roll down the nape of his neck from his wet hair. He had another towel folded on the counter in the bathroom, but even two months later Yassen loathed to turn his back on anyone voluntarily. Instead he ran his hands through his hair, flicked his fingers to get rid of the droplets. He didn’t aim for Rouse, which he felt was as good a concession to his teacher as any.

Rouse caught the gesture and grinned; he looked absurdly fond as he looked at Yassen.

“No class today - Nye wants us in his office. Poppy is meeting us there,” he dragged his eyes over Yassen too slowly to miss and added, “You should probably put on a shirt.” If his face had been fond, it had nothing on the of warmth in his voice. Yassen had heard it before, but never outside of instructions offered over sweaty skin at close quarters. There was the possibility that it was even genuine.

He put on his shirt.

“You came along better than I’d expected at first, even though I still wouldn’t recommend you for anything that requires a convincing performance for an extended time. You just don’t have the personality for it.”

Yassen tilted his head to acknowledge Rouse but didn’t respond. He’d be sent on whatever missions the Board thought he would be useful on.

Rouse smiled at him again but let him keep his silence as they walked toward the Principal’s office. It went more quickly than Yassen would have liked.

As he’d expected, Mr. Nye and Poppy were there, making conversation more stilted than usual. The reason for their awkwardness was apparent as soon as Yassen stepped fully through the door. Julia Rothman was sitting in an armchair just outside the usual range of vision. Black leather, with a high back that curved like the crest of a wave. It must have been brought up specifically for her, as Yassen knew that Mr. Nye preferred his guests to occupy the low-slung visitor chairs in the corner.

As they entered, Rouse moved quietly to stand beside Poppy, leaving Yassen alone in the under Mrs. Rothman’s level stare. It was the first time he’d been in the same room as her since Hunter died. She was close enough to touch, and the thought made his hands itch for the gun at his side.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise. She’d been the one to recommend him for this training, and Julia Rothman hadn’t gotten to her position in life by turning a blind eye to her investments. He stood still and let her watch him, aware of the cling of his shirt and the slim lines of his body in a way that had been foreign only a few weeks ago. Poppy had called it being ‘aware of yourself’, but Yassen thought the truth was closer to being aware of others. Where their eyes caught on his body, what they wanted from him. It was something he thought he’d left behind in Moscow, but had returned sharper than ever as an adult.

That it was a skill that made him more dangerous as well was barely any consolation.

Mrs. Rothman spoke at last.

“Kiss me.” It wasn’t a request.

Yassen didn’t hesitate. He moved toward her, closer and closer until he was moving against her, stepping between her legs in their knife-sharp business trousers and dangerous heels. That she was seated was the only reason he was able to lean so close, and he pressed the minor advantage it offered. Anything to shift the balance in his favor. Between one breath and the next, Yassen took Julia Rothman’s face between his hands and pressed his lips to hers. Coaxed them open gently and insistently, fingertips rubbing small circles into the sensitive skin behind her ears until he felt her whisper a sigh into his mouth at his teasing. Moved forward again, pulling her into him and electrically aware of every brush of her thighs against his, of the way she shifted to make him press against her.

When he pulled back several seconds later, he took her bottom lip with him, leaving a hint of teeth and dirty promise as he let it slip from his mouth.

He stepped away as quickly as he’d moved closer at her command, resting at easy attention while he waited for the verdict.

That red lipstick was feathering in the corners of her mouth, blurred around the edges. She still looked as if she could have walked off the cover of a magazine, and as serene as she had been the first time he’d laid eyes on her at eighteen.

His own face was probably a mess - there had been a slick waxy sensation when he kissed her, and Yassen was sure it was intentional. And yes, even as the thought crossed his mind, Mrs. Rothman uncapped a small black tube of lipstick and reapplied it without the aid of a mirror. Long careful strokes, dragging fresh color over the lips he’d just kissed.

She caught him looking and smiled, slow and mean.

He breathed a careful breath and turned to watch Mr. Nye instead.

The Principal looked pleased past words, watching him with the glow of someone who had gotten an unexpected present.

“Poppy, Rouse, you did fantastic work here. And in such a short amount of time, too.”

Rouse accepted the compliment as his due, but Poppy demurred. “Cossack was a- well, not a natural, but he takes instruction well. And it was so nice to have a blank slate,” she added a touch wistfully. Unlike two month ago in this office, she was actually looking at him, rather than somewhere in the middle distance. That same warmth he’d seen in earlier in his room from Rouse.

“Well, Mrs. Rothman? Your thoughts?”

By some magic of cosmetics and polished charisma, her face was immaculate again. She sat back in the chair, crossed her legs at the ankle, almost prim, and considered Yassen without any fondness at all. Just focus, offering no ounce of sympathy though he was sure that if anyone could tell that he was less collected than usual, it was her.

Beneath the level of threat that any member of the Board carried, Yassen was sure that Mrs. Rothman hadn’t forgotten that Hunter had been his mentor, or his snub of her affections.

The thought sent an unexpected pang of bitterness through his chest. Hunter had agreed to have him trained like this but hadn’t been able to fall into Mrs. Rothman’s bed himself. Perhaps if he had, he’d be alive today.

“Your reports weren’t exaggerating about his improvement. I’m almost surprised, but I have a good eye for potential.” And with that, Mrs. Rothman unfolded herself from the chair and swung her coat over her shoulders in a liquid shrug, the issue of Yassen’s training already fading from her attention. “Have it written into his file, and add the cost to his debt.” She cocked her head to the side, turning to appraise Yassen one final time. “I’m sure he’ll be able to pay it off quickly enough.”

And then she was gone, the sound of her heels cut off abruptly as the sound-proofed door swung closed behind her. Mr. Nye had already pulled his file, making notes in the margins about her feedback. Yassen watched the pen scrawl back and forth, red ink vivid but impossible to make out from this distance.

“Cossack, you can return to your room and pack. There’s a job we have in mind for you that was put off these last weeks - you’ll leave this evening; the briefing will be delivered over lunch. Poppy, Rouse, please stay behind for a full report.”

Yassen nodded and slipped through the door before any of them could catch his eye.

He walked quickly and silently as ever and let the halls slip by without notice. It was done. Less than two months later and he had another skill to be added to his quickly thickening file, and an assignment waiting for him. Life was returning to normal and he was ready for the change. The new debt was annoying but inevitable, and he was horribly grateful to be leaving Malagosto that night. A job would focus him again. There was a new trembling between his ribs that didn’t make sense, but Yassen pressed forward as he neared his room, the door swinging open with a bare touch from where Rouse had neglected to lock it behind them.

He didn’t make the same mistake, locking it quickly behind him and moving toward the center of his bedroom where he could breathe.

It didn’t take long to get his heartbeat under control. Yassen moved to the bathroom, picked up the folded towel from earlier and turned the sink to ‘hot’. Only then did he look in the mirror.

His suspicions had been right - there was lipstick smeared across his mouth, deep red and bright. His lips looked wrecked, and a hint of the color lingered on his jaw. Yassen ran the water until it was steaming, and then rubbed away Mrs. Rothman’s lipstick in careful circles, until his skin was clean, red only from the heat and the rasp of the towel.

He folded it carefully back up, made sure it wouldn’t drip on the floor, and went to strip the sheets from his bed.

They had been dirty for a while.


End file.
